It puzzles me how recruiters are not making informed and calculated decisions on their recruitment marketing spend. Are you measuring the performance of each job advert via each source? Which sources are the best performing, provide the largest volume and have the lowest candidate acquisition cost?

There is no excuse for job boards, social networking sites, recruitment websites, search engines, etc not to provide statistics on the performance of your advertising. The technology and data has always been there - we just don't understand how to analyze and interpret this information. Are you tracking candidate sources?

Let's face it; there is a glut of data. First we need to understand the appropriate recruiting metrics to consider the information effective and reliable.

Metrics must be predictive and actionable. Statistics are needed to provide accurate information that can be acted upon by providing data to indicate trends.

Metrics must be tracked over time in order to generate internal benchmarks and analyze internal performance. A metric is not simply a moment in time – it must be maintained over time by tracking data to present relevant trends.

Recruitment metrics should include both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Recruitment metrics are most often focused on factors that involve only time and cost. Yes, these factors are still included in the typical framework of recruitment metrics. Time and cost obviously comprise the quantitative aspects of recruitment metrics while productivity, retention, efficiency and candidate performance comprise the qualitative aspects.

So what data should we analyze?

The first step is to start measuring the performance of your job ads in terms of conversion rates. These metrics will help you quickly identify bottlenecks with your current recruitment funnel and provide a simple snapshot. Then, you can start to drill down and look at the individual job advert vs source 1 vs source 2 etc.

Ad Views - The number of times a job advert is viewed. May also be referred to as an "impression"

Apply Clicks - The number of times the "Apply Now" button has been clicked. May also be referred to as a "Click through"

Application Form Views - The number of times a job application form is viewed. This should be the same as the "Apply Clicks". If you are using a 3rd party application form, it is important to analyze the "drop off rate". There could be problems with the external application form not loading etc. Aim for 0% drop off.

Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.

GC (3:44pm Tuesday 08 September 2009)

Hi.

Sometimes the click through's are good, applications received are high but conversions (hired) is low. So please advise if we can also include offers/offer acceptance/hired as a metric for each advert?

If you have the available data, you can mine it any way you want to. There are only a handful of recruitment databases/ATS that have the ability to track original source > hire.

I deliberately left out analyzing time on site, time conversion from click > application > submissions, ub's, sent to friend count, etc as it would have been too much for the readers to take in at this point.

Is all this important to measure - YES! But how many times have you had a candidate pop out of a low performing medium?

terra (2:01pm Friday 25 September 2009)

Jobs2Web is paving the way in real time advertising effectiveness reporting.

Joel (8:21am Tuesday 24 November 2009)

The main metric I use is cost per acquisition. Calculated by NEW candidates imported. So many candidates apply for multiple roles or are already in our database. Using this figure will give more accurate view on job board performance - and what we found was that when you add a new job board on it may be worse performing in cost per App but cost per acquisition is better than seek - which therefore means we actually get better value. This data is pretty manual to pull though, recruitment systems really are behind the game in marketing reports.

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